This article is the follow-up from post. The Jenkinsstarted bywas a huge success and, as a result, decided to start fresh. At this moment, I imagine you, dear reader, rolling your eyes and wondering why would someone start over if a project is a success. Build Flow project began during 2012, and it was, from the very beginning, considered a proof of concept. The response from the community was very positive, and the plugin received a broad adoption that demonstrated that the direction of the plugin was correct and should be explored more. However, the plugin hit some technical limitations that prevented the community from developing it further. As a result, the decision was made to start fresh using the knowledge and experience obtained through the Build Flow Plugin. The Jenkins was born, and, later, renamed to. It continues maintaining the core idea of the Build Flow Plugin while the previous experience allowed the contributors to avoid some of the mistakes and significantly improve the design. Key Features of the Jenkins Pipeline Plugin The principal characteristic of the Pipeline plugin is that the jenkins pipeline if flow is defined through code. On the other hand, since the plugin uses Groovy, almost any operation can be defined with relative ease. We can, finally, use conditionals, loops, variables, and so on. Since Groovy is an integral part of Jenkins, we can also use it to access almost any existing plugin, or even Jenkins core features. It can be considered a new language with a very simple syntax. Domain-specific languages have been around for a long jenkins pipeline if and proved to be more efficient at defining very precise sets of tasks. The plugin was designed in a way that it can be easily extended. We can commit it to the repository, use pull requests, code reviews, and so on. Moreover, the Multibranch Pipeline Plugin allows us to store the script in Jenkinsfile and define different flows inside each branch. Indeed, the Pipeline plugin opened some doors that were previously closed or very hard to pass through. That was only a jenkins pipeline if peek at the Pipeline plugin capabilities. Disclosure: I wrote this book. Among many other subjects, it explores Jenkins, the Pipeline plugin, and the ecosystem around it in much more detail. This book is about different techniques that help us architect software in a better and more efficient way with microservices packed as immutable containers, tested and deployed continuously to servers that are automatically provisioned with configuration management tools. In other words, this book envelops the whole microservices development and deployment lifecycle using some of the latest and greatest practices and tools. The book is available from and Amazon and other worldwide sites.
